


Blood Will Tell

by RedHorse



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Age Difference, Angst, Blood Magic, Happy Ending, M/M, Magical Resurrection, Rituals, Sex Magic, underage (Harry is just under 17)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-08
Updated: 2020-02-08
Packaged: 2021-02-27 17:14:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22467004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedHorse/pseuds/RedHorse
Summary: Harry finds a photograph.
Relationships: Sirius Black/Harry Potter
Comments: 22
Kudos: 564
Collections: Lightningstar Holiday Fest





	Blood Will Tell

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wynnebat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wynnebat/gifts).
  * In response to a prompt by [wynnebat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wynnebat/pseuds/wynnebat) in the [LightningstarHolidayFest](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/LightningstarHolidayFest) collection. 



> **Prompt:**
> 
> Sex magic/ritual.
> 
> A/N
> 
> No beta! No plan! Lots of rambling! Strange changes in tone! Enjoy!!!!!!!

**Summer 1995.**

  
  


After the veil, Harry dreamed of Sirius almost nightly. Nightmares, certainly. Memories of watching him fall, the tattered veil parting to swallow him, he relived more often than he’d like.

But just as often they were pleasant dreams. Which were somehow worse.

He dreamed of carrying boxes of his things out of the Dursleys’ and into Grimmauld Place. Of peeling away festering wallpaper and painting everything in shades of white and gold or a clean sky blue. Of rides on the motorcycle or brooms. Cheeseburgers and chips on the stoop.

In the most frequent dream of all Sirius arrived at the Dursleys’, announcing himself by throwing open the door and leaning a leather-clad shoulder against the doorframe.

Harry would come out from under the stairs (even though he’d not been in the cupboard for years) and stare at him through a blur of tears.

_ Sirius _ , he’d manage. In dreams, Harry found, it was almost impossible to say anything. The more you wanted to say it, the tighter your throat closed.

_ I’ve come to get you out of here!  _ Sirius exclaimed, in some variation. He’d see Harry’s expression then and freeze.

_ What’s the matter, Harry? _

_ You’re here _ , Harry would try to say, but his voice was a whisper and Sirius couldn’t have heard, but he’d smiled as though he had and tentatively hold out his arms.

_ I’m here, _ he’d say softly, then when Harry vaulted into his arms he’d laugh in dismay.

_You thought I’d died?_ _What would make you think something as crazy as that?_

*

The day before Harry’s sixteenth birthday, an enterprising Death-Eater left six dead crows on the Weasleys’ doorstep.

The party was canceled and Headmaster Dumbledore did not come to collect Harry from Privet Drive.

That meant that Harry’s birthday was only commemorated by an offhand word from Aunt Petunia, which Harry didn’t catch in full but ran something along the lines of  _ just two more years ‘til we’re rid of him. _

But the Dursleys had been expecting Harry to go. They’d planned a holiday, and didn’t want to miss it. So after an argument conducted entirely in noisy whispers, Vernon and Petunia concluded they would have their holiday, and Harry would stay behind.

“You are not to go into any room but your own, the downstairs bathroom and the kitchen,” Vernon said, shaking his finger at Harry so hard his chins wobbled. “Nor are you allowed to touch . . . anything.”

The latter didn’t seem to be a very realistic order, but Harry nodded anyway. He was so tired, it wasn’t hard to pretend to be meek.

It amused him to watch them lock up every room in the house but his, and then he had a strange, pure thrill when he their car pulled away.

Years before, Petunia had assigned Harry the task of cleaning the attic as a punishment for calling Dudley a name. It had turned out to be no punishment at all. Harry had found a shoebox containing a dozen photographs of a young Petunia and Vernon inside it, and a single, additional photograph of his mother. At the time, he hadn’t known where to hide it, but now he had his trunk. He’d been thinking for years that if he ever had an opportunity, he’d go back and snatch it. 

Fortunately for him, it hadn’t occurred to them to lock up the attic. Harry found a torch, pulled down the stairs in the upstairs hallway, and ascended them slowly, wincing when a shower of dust came down from above and made him sneeze.

He switched on the torch and held it up; there was plenty more dust in a thick layer over everything and rising in the air too. It made hazy rings in the light as he set the flashlight down briefly to lever himself up the final step. 

The attic wasn’t used much. If the Dursleys got tired of something, they were more likely to dispose of it and get something new than to store it. But there were dozens of crates of Dudley’s old things, over which Petunia tended to be sentimental, so he had to lift a few lids and find old toys and Halloween costumes and hastily-scrawled drawings before he worked his way into things that had clearly been put away before Dudley was even born.

He remembered the shoebox being inside a larger box, he was sure. The eaves of the roof got narrower as he worked his way back, and after he bumped his head against a beam, he muffled a curse and dropped to his knees, crawling forward. He opened another box, the torch pinned between his cheek and shoulder, then froze at the sight of the battered shoebox he remembered so well, nestled just inside.

Harry reached out and tipped back the lid. He’d left the photograph at the bottom, just in case someone should find see the box in passing as Harry had. He knew none of the Dursleys would let a stray image of Lily Potter escape undestroyed. 

His hand was trembling when he drew out the photograph he’d been looking for, cupping it in his palm and holding it close to his face so he could make it out. His mother looked younger than he remembered, but that was probably because when he’d seen it before he’d been younger, too. In this picture, she couldn’t be much older than Harry was now…

The torch slipped and clattered to the floor, rolling away. Harry swore, clutching the picture to his chest with one hand, and used the other to crawl after the torch.

His hand missed the nail, but it snagged in his shin, sharp enough to go right through his denims and straight into his leg. The pain startled Harry and he jerked his leg back, turning a painful puncture wound into a jagged laceration in a moment.

There was so much blood, and so fast. He dropped the picture so he could grope at his leg with both hands. The torch was casting all its light into a far corner, leaving Harry unable to see himself, but it hardly mattered. He could feel the blood coursing down his leg, rushing between his fingers like a stream, saturating his jeans. He stood up for just long enough to feel slipperiness in his saturated sock and squelching in his shoe. He was soon too faint to keep his balance and fell backward.

Harry’s head hit the box behind him, which might have broken his fall if it was full of soft toys or old clothes. Inconveniently, it contained a stack of books. The impact knocked Harry out cold.

The second Harry lost consciousness, a bright white light erupted in the attic. Had Harry been conscious he would have heard a soft rushing noise. A breeze swirled in the room, originating from the photograph which had fallen from Harry’s hand and drifted to the floor, as though innocent. It landed in the growing pool of blood surrounding Harry’s legs and leaching silently into the corner of the nearest box. The breeze swirled outward, and wherever it reached, the droplets of blood rose into its current like a million individual rubies, formed a tight coil, then funneled into the photograph. 

The edges of the photograph curled and stretched until it formed a cube, then its faded white backing darkened and showed the grain of wood.

Within a few moments, the blood and the photograph were gone. A wooden box sat in their place, the breeze died, and Harry regained consciousness with a gasp.

He grasped his leg, but he felt no wound and his denims were dry. He clutched the back of his head and winced, but it was merely sore.

He looked for the photograph and saw the box.

More carefully this time, Harry retrieved the torch and aimed it at the box.

It was made of a reddish wood, maybe cherry, and a word was carved into the lid:  _ Bloom _ . Surrounding the letters was a swirl of delicately-carved flowers Harry recognized as lilies.

Slowly Harry sank back to his knees and reached out with a fingertip to tip back the lid. It went easily, feather-light on a silent slender hinge. 

Harry felt a burst of cool air on his knuckles and flinched, but nothing happened. He held the torch closer and his eyes widened at what he saw.

Inside the box was a miniature library. Or at least, a library’s worth of miniature books. Harry could hardly have fit his fist in the box, but there were small shelves inside lined with rows of thousands of what were unmistakably books, but on an insect’s scale.

There was a knocking sound from downstairs. Harry jumped at the sudden interruption, but managed not to drop the torch a second time. Harry put the lid on the box, picked it up carefully and managed the ladder—slowly—with one hand.

Mrs. Figg was on the other side of the door, two cats wound around her ankles and a third on her shoulder.

“Everything all right, Harry?”

“Yes, Mrs. Figg,” Harry said politely. It didn’t seem worth mentioning that he’d thought he was going to bleed to death alone in the attic. Apparently he was now fine. He almost mentioned the box, but Mrs. Figg wasn’t a witch. She probably didn’t know what sort of boxes could be hidden in a photograph.

He should write Ron or Hermione. Then he remembered the absence of a birthday party which he hadn’t quite forgiven anyone for, even though the crows were no one’s fault but the Death Eaters’, and it  _ had _ been disconcerting that someone could so easily breach the Weasleys’ outer wards…

He’d almost forgotten about Mrs. Figg in the confusion of his own addled head. “You’re sure?” She peered past him into the house. “The Muggles left you, have they?”

Harry nodded.

“Well, just knock if you need anything,” she said in parting, and walked off.

Harry wished hard for a Floo connection or the ability to Apparate. He didn’t know where he’d go, but the house suddenly felt dangerous. He’d always hated it here, but it had also felt predictable. Reliably non-magical. And what had just happened in the attic was neither of those things.

His heart was beating very fast, so Harry leaned against the closed door and pressed his eyes closed. His stomach growled alarmingly, and when he tried to straighten up again, his head swam—as though he  _ had _ lost a lot of blood... 

He slumped against the door again and then heard a loud crack that flooded him with adrenaline and made his vision focus immediately.

“Harry Potter,” said Dobby, in tones of reverence. He was holding another, familiar elf, firmly by his bony arm.

“Let go of Kreacher!” snarled said familiar elf.

“I have brought Harry Potter his elf,” Dobby said solemnly. “He is being a very, very bad elf,” he added, looking testily at Kreacher. Dobby was wearing a small, spotted pink skirt, and a blue pot holder strapped to his thin chest with bits of string, looking absurdly like armor.

Kreacher wore a filthy rag of indeterminate origin meant to cover him from throat to ankle, just as Harry remembered from their acquaintance last year at 12 Grimmauld Place. But he was fighting Dobby so desperately that Harry kept getting flashes of his bony arms and legs. When he failed at wrenching his arm from the younger elf he made a fist and swung it toward Dobby’s right ear.

“Kreacher, no!” Harry shouted.

He hadn’t expected Kreacher to listen, but the arm froze as though stopped by an invisible force, trembling in midair.

Dobby flattened his ears appreciatively. “Thank you, Harry Potter. Dobby knew that the inheritance was in order. The bad elf said it hadn’t gone as Sirius Black planned, but Dobby knew.”

“Kreacher will  _ not _ obey the  _ boy _ ! Kreacher belongs with his young mistress! He—” 

“Quiet, please,” Harry said coolly to Kreacher, and felt a dark satisfaction when the elf’s mouth clicked shut. “Why are you here, Dobby?” he asked the other house-elf in a kinder tone.

“Headmaster Dumbledore asked Dobby to come.”

Harry crossed his arms, feeling defensive just at the mention of his professor. He was still sitting on the floor, the door behind him and the box in his lap. Now, he slowly got back to his feet, managing to do so without losing his balance again. “Oh. Did he . . . did he say if he was still coming?”

“Headmaster Dumbledore is not coming,” said Dobby sympathetically. “Dobby is sorry. The Order does not think it is safe for Harry Potter at the Burrow.”

Something occurred to Harry, and it tugged him out of the morose mood that was threatening, always threatening. “You could get me out of here, though!”

Dobby looked at Harry nervously. “It is not being safe.”

Harry spoke without thinking. “What about 12 Grimmauld Place? It’s safe there, isn’t it?” 

_ It’s mine, isn’t it?  _ He might have asked, but the implications were still like prodding an open wound.

“It might be safe,” Dobby admitted with unmistakable reluctance.

Harry managed a strained smile. “Then I’ll get my things!” He took a step toward the stairs.

“Harry Potter,” Dobby said firmly, having drawn himself up to his full height. He poked out his oven-mitt-covered chest and settled his hands on his prominent hipbones. “Headmaster Dumbledore is not agreeing to Harry Potter leaving his home.”

Kreacher had caught sight of the box in Harry’s hands, and was looking at it with his beady eyes narrowed.

“I don’t need you to agree, Dobby,” Harry realized. “I can make Kreacher take me.”

Kreacher’s eyes swept from the box to Harry’s face and he grimaced scornfully. “The half-blood brat! Setting foot in my poor mistress’ home!”

“I said to be quiet.”   
  
Kreacher tucked his ears tightly against his head and his eyes burned with the purest hatred yet, but Harry didn’t even flinch at the thought of going off to the miserable old Black house with no one but an elf who hated him for company.

_ He’s not there _ , his subconscious reminded him scathingly.

For some reason, he thought he felt a flash of warmth in the box at that thought.

#  *

It never would have occurred to Harry if it wasn’t for his mother.

Would that horrify her? He tried to imagine her reaction, but couldn’t. He didn’t know her after all. In his mind’s eye she was always smiling softly, like a photograph, looking at Harry without seeing him.

It wasn’t such a sacrifice, was it, for Sirius’ life? She would understand, wouldn’t she? She wouldn’t want him to lose someone he didn’t have to lose. She wouldn’t want him to be alone.

*

**Summer 1996.**

There was a grandfather clock in Grimmauld Place that hung on the wall in the moldering study where Sirius had once warned Harry never to go. But it was the final ingredient for the ritual described by the grimoire that Harry had found and spent most of sixth year interpreting, the one that promised a body and soul in exchange for four pints of carefully-administered blood.

So Harry stood on the desk against the wall to reach it. He left footprints in the caked dust on the desktop, revealing a dark leather surface Harry hoped hadn’t come from the hide of anything too horrible.

He hooked his fingers behind the clock’s wooden frame and pulled. This put him face-to-face with the clock’s dusty circle of runes where an ordinary clock would have numbers, and six fixed hands where an ordinary clock would have two.

For a moment nothing happened, reminiscent of his every effort to detach Walburga’s portrait. Then, with a reluctant little sight, the sticking Charm gave and the clock rested against Harry’s chest and thighs, solid and heavy. He staggered, and for a horrible moment thought he’d crash backwards off the desk, but after a moment he regained his balance instead and was able to step down carefully.

Harry took the clock to the ritual circle he’d made in the living room. Furniture was shoved against the walls, and he’d rolled back the moth-eaten rug. Kreacher crouched in a corner with his ears flattened, staring beadily at Harry with commingled hatred and curiosity. 

“I’ve left the  _ master _ his things,” the elf muttered, pointing a claw-tipped finger toward the center of the circle, where there was a tidy stack of bleached-white bones.

“Good,” Harry said, setting the clock down and trying ineffectively to wipe the thick, cloying dust that had transferred from the desk and the clock to his clothing. He fished for his wand and cleaned himself with magic. He was still pink from how thoroughly he’d scrubbed himself in the shower in anticipation of the second phase.

Glancing up, he saw Kreacher still watching. Skin crawling at the thought of what he’d witness if he decided to continue snooping, Harry said tersely, “Go, then, and don’t come back unless I call.”

Kreacher grimaced, gave a short bow, and disapparated.

Harry stripped off his clothes, picked up the knife, and traced it firmly across all the places the grimoir asked. He hissed at the feeling, and the hot streams of blood that raced from each cut over Harry’s carefully washed skin to drip onto the floor. Wherever blood made contact within the circle, it disappeared with a hiss. As more blood was fed into the circle, Harry caught the growing scent of ozone.

When he wasn’t sure he could stand any longer, bleeding from each bicep, fingertip, and two cuts across the back of his knees, he stretched out on the floor. Rolling his head, he looked at the clock and his eyes widened.

All traces of dust were gone. Its amber-brown wooden case glowed like a freshly-polished wand and the beveled glass protecting the face and the weight and pendulum sparkled with a brassy shine. The face of the clock was pure ivory, but a tide of red was rising from the bottom toward the center; it bubbled, ruby-red: Harry’s blood.

The runes began to glow, one at a time. Harry wondered if he had enough blood. He was feeling so very faint, and the face was only half-filled.

The clock shuddered and began to tick, the pendulum swaying back and forth, in time with the slow pulse in Harry’s ears.

When his vision was starry, narrowed to a fine point just large enough for him to take in the clock-face, it was filled entirely with the blood-red hue, and with a rushing sound, magic rolled up from the floor and Harry’s wounds sealed with a painless tingle.

The floor felt slippery. Beneath him, it undulated, as though instead of planks of wood, it was built on the belly of a struggling animal. Harry, alarmed by the sensation, scrambled to a sitting position, still dizzy and slow but fueled by adrenaline. Up from the floor a lump was rising, growing, taking the shape of a person. The wood grain was pulled tight, like it was a texture painted over a wet sheet, and beneath the membrane were a man’s shoulders, the jut of a hip, twisting to be free. Harry caught a brief glimpse of a face as the head lashed to and fro, pressing against the confines of the floor-turned-womb: Sirius.

Then the barrier broke, the magic snapped, and Harry was scrambling to lean over the naked, wet, gasping body of his godfather, his hands hovering but too shocked and anxious and overcome to actually touch.

The candlelight leapt along the walls in a strange dance. Sirius’ breathing finally settled after a final desperate gasp, and he struggled up onto his elbows. Had he always had so many muscles? Harry had never seen him like this, of course, but he also never seen him like  _ this _ , with curved biceps and ridges even in his forearms, with rounded thighs, his flaccid cock lying against an eight-pack abdomen, altogether like the sort of image in a dirty magazine from under Dean’s bed, which Seamus would scoff at and say,  _ must be magically-enhanced _ . . . 

Harry blushed and looked away. He was exhausted from the first part of the ritual and it left him with no energy to panic, but he was still nervous.

“Harry?” Sirius breathed, and Harry’s gaze snapped back. He slowly walked toward Sirius on his knees and stopped to kneel between his feet.

“Yeah,” he said, with a wobbly smile. “I brought you back.”

“You . . . ” Sirius’ eyes scanned Harry’s face, then dropped to his bare chest and narrowed, confused. “Why are you . . . ” Then he noticed his own nudity, and struggled up onto his elbows, scooting away from Harry. “Merlin, you’re . . . ”

Harry put a hand on Sirius’ ankle. His skin felt like he’d been greased in oil, pleasantly slick.

“How did you bring me back, Harry?” he whispered. Harry tightened his grip on Sirius and his heart beat fast and hot in his ears. Sweat broke out on his upper lip and he darted his tongue out to catch it—it tasted like blood.

“ _Habeas corpus_ _per Sanguine_ ,” Harry said, his pronunciation confident after all that practice. He tugged on Sirius’ ankle. “But we aren’t finished.”

Sirius was shaking his head. “That’s blood magic, Harry, and . . . ” he looked down at himself again, then at Harry, then winced like the sight of Harry’s body hurt. Harry was too distracted by all his other heaving emotions to be offended. Besides, he knew what he looked like. Skin and bones, scrawny, practically hairless. Whereas Sirius . . . he’d been handsome his whole life, but he wasunfairly beautiful in this revived adult body, scoured of all the marks of Azkaban. 

“You shouldn’t have,” Sirius breathed, meeting Harry’s eye.

Harry didn’t know what to say to that, except, “I already did.” His hand was rubbing Sirius’ ankle almost unconsciously—trying to soothe him, to stop him, to keep him close, Harry wasn’t sure. All he knew was the magic was piling up in him and making him  _ need _ . Sirius stared at him with wide eyes.

“I need you here with me,” Harry said. “Please. I need you to . . . ” his cheeks were hot “come. Inside me.”

Sirius looked like he’d been punched. “Harry. Harry, Merlin, no . . . ”

Harry felt tears threatening as he said fiercely, “ _ Yes _ . I . . . it might hurt but I know p-people do it, and . . . ” He wet his lips, trying not to stammer. “You know how, don’t you? You were . . . you have, with a bloke, I know you have . . . ”

Sirius was white as a sheet. “I . . . can’t. I  _ can’t _ .”

Harry lowered his eyes. “You can just pretend I’m someone else.”

Sirius sat up. “Harry,” he said, sounding broken. “It’s not that. Well, it’s not  _ not _ that . . . ”

Harry looked up through his lashes, his hand still on Sirius’ ankle, tight. “I know. I’m not—we’re not—it’s weird. But . . . ” he raised a trembling hand to Sirius’ knee, looking him earnestly in the face. “It’s worth it. It’s more than worth it. To me.”

Sirius looked anguished, but he wasn’t trying to get away with any immediacy. “Where did you find the spell?”   
  
Harry, not expecting that question at this moment, trembled with a fresh wave of requirement for . . .  _ something _ . Something, which seemed to involve Sirius’ body, based on the powerful urge he had to get closer, to put his hands and his  _ mouth _ . . . 

He looked around outside the rune circle for the grimoire and, seeing it, lifted his hand from Sirius’ knee and murmured  _ Accio _ . It flew to him, still open to the relevant page. Sirius took the book with a deep frown, his eyes skimming over the page with an experienced wizard’s ease, learning in one reading what it had taken Harry months to puzzle through.

He wrinkled his nose and tossed the book aside like it offended him. Harry flinched at the sound of it hitting the floor a foot outside the runes.

“It doesn’t have to be . . . ” Sirius swallowed. “It could be your mouth.” He said the last word like it was an unspeakable curse, with barely any volume.

Harry felt something unclench inside him, at the thought of . . . 

“ _ Yes _ ,” he murmured. 

Sirius’ expression went hazy, like he was half-asleep or, perhaps, thought he was dreaming. He leaned back a little but stayed propped on his elbows, eyes wide as Harry slowly crawled up between his legs again. Harry was nervous, so horribly nervous, but also  _ eager _ . Whether it was the magic or his own interest in the objectively lovely body under his hands, he couldn’t say. Still, when confronted with Sirius’ cock, stirring but not yet hard in a nest of black hair, he froze.

Sirius’ hand settled on the back of his head. “Go on,” he said, voice hoarse but gentle. “I’ll show you.”

Harry wet his lips and opened his mouth as Sirius guided him down. The musky, slack flesh was surprisingly pleasant to taste and feel. Sirius breathed out a soft, inaudible word—a curse? Harry’s name? Harry looked up to see, and when their eyes met Sirius groaned and he began to harden fast on Harry’s tongue.

“The head,” Sirius said roughly, his grip tightening in Harry’s hair. “You—gently.” The tug on Harry’s scalp made him start to get hard, too. He’d worried the shock and embarrassment of it all might prevent him, but he found even the touch of Sirius’ hand was almost deliriously exciting. No one had ever been naked under his hands, of course, but neither had anyone given him more than a friendly, passing touch. It was unbelievably satisfying to feel Sirius cradle his head, to know that the sounds that Sirius was making were because of Harry’s mouth.

Knowing that Sirius was only here at all because of Harry’s blood.

Harry thought the word Sirius couldn’t quite bring himself to say was  _ suck _ , so that’s what he did.

When Sirius got hard enough that his cock filled Harry’s mouth, he coughed and tugged against the hand holding his head tight, and Sirius instantly released him, cupped his jaw, spoke slurred nonsense in a soothing and apologetic tone. Harry looked up the span of Sirius’ body to his face, his eyes blurry with moisture. He pulled his glasses off and put them aside.

“I’m okay,” he told Sirius lowly, grasping his now-hard cock in one hand as he lowered his face back to his strange and mesmerizing task. “I’m okay.” 

The magic was encouraging him, pushing him, a tug he couldn’t feel and whispers he couldn’t hear, a strange rushing current he was caught in. The distraction made everything easier, made him forget what exactly he was doing, simply relaxing into the act of it, the throat-bruising toil of it. But every time Sirius made a noise or his thighs clenched under Harry’s hands or his hand moved in Harry’s hair, it struck Harry with a jolt of immediacy.

Sirius. Sirius was back. Harry had him back. Harry had him in a way he’d never had anyone before. The dark nonsensical glee at that knowledge built up in him until he had to flatten his body and rub his own cock against the carpet, desperate for pressure, for some kind of relief.

Harry knew enough about the mechanics of his own body that he’d thought all he had to do was get his mouth on Sirius, follow the worldless guidance of Sirius’ hands and cock, and that Sirius would come. But after several long minutes, Sirius remained startlingly large and hard with no signs of release. Harry paused, his mouth wet and swollen, and blinked in the direction of Sirius’ face, now out of the range of Harry’s vision with his glasses cast aside.

“What’s wrong? What can I . . . ?”

Sirius had his arm over his eyes, Harry could tell that much.

“I—” his breath hitched, like a sob. “Harry, I—”

Almost unconsciously, Harry shuffled forward so that his cock made contact with the yielding heat of Sirius’ thigh; so much better than the floor. Sirius gasped, startled, at the feeling, and Harry froze.

He remembered that he wasn’t supposed to enjoy this. It was a magical transaction, that was all. But he bit his lip and ground against Sirius, helpless against the tide of magic and his own desperate body.

“I’m s-sorry,” he managed to pant, but still didn’t stop.

Sirius got up on his elbows again, bringing their faces close. He lifted one hand back to Harry’s hair and stroked him from his crown to the nape of his neck. Harry had to close his eyes, the feeling was so good. Almost better than the pressure on his cock as he rolled into Sirius’ thigh again and groaned.

“Don’t be sorry,” Sirius said lowly. “Do what you like.”

Harry dropped his face into Sirius’ shoulder with a little cry. Sirius held him there, murmuring into his ear, and stroked him again and again, raking the hair off his temple. He bent his knee so Harry had a sharper angle, and Harry grunted and jerked in earnest, arhythmic and lost until a burst of wetness bloomed between them.

“N-now, Harry,” Sirius said with a gasp, lying flat again and pressing Harry down toward his cock by his shoulders. “Now, quick, I—”

Harry barely got into position in time, drowsy and disoriented from his own orgasm, but he managed it. He sucked Sirius in and drank every bitter drop, and each time he swallowed the haze of hungry magic fell back more and more, until finally, well-fed, it rumbled into dormancy. 

*

Afterward, the taste of Sirius still bitter on the back of his tongue, Harry lap with his cheek on Sirius’ hip, Sirius’ hand combing back his hair. Between the first phase of the ritual, and this strange surrendering of his virginity, and the magical output to anchor Sirius, he wasn’t sure if he was alert enough to qualify as conscious.

“We’re at Grimmauld Place,” Sirius said grimly, breaking the silence at last.

Harry lifted his head. Sirius wasn’t asking, though. He was looking at the walls and ceiling surrounding them. His eye lingered on the clock, which was silent again, all traces of blood and magic drained from it.

“You’ve been gone over a year,” Harry said. “Did—were you—somewhere?”

Sirius slowly rolled over, spilling Harry off of his legs. Harry curled on his side facing Sirius, carefully not touching. He missed the hand that had been resting on his head, but looking into Sirius’ perfect, beloved, living face distracted him.

“I was somewhere empty,” Sirius said flatly. “Empty, and dark, and cold.”

Harry shuddered, blinking back the tears that were still close to the surface. “I’m sorry it took me so long.”

Sirius looked at his face, eyes narrowed. “Don’t be. You had no—” He gritted his teeth and stopped himself, swallowing. “What happened wasn’t your fault. You didn’t . . . this wasn’t . . . “ He closed his eyes. “Harry, you shouldn’t have tried to bring me back.”

“I didn’t just  _ try _ ,” Harry said stiffly. Sirius’ eyes popped open in surprise, and the ghost of his familiar, wry smile touched his mouth for a brief and heartbreaking moment.

“That’s right. Merlin couldn’t stop a Potter who puts his mind to something,” Sirius murmured, and reached into the space between them as though he would touch Harry’s face, but he halted himself and settled on Harry’s hand instead. “I was nowhere I wanted to be, Harry,” he said gruffly. “Thank you.” He took a breath through his nose and met Harry’s eye. “We should wash up. And put on clothes.”

Harry snorted and smiled tentatively. “Yeah,” he said, the awkwardness settling in over him like lead weights dropped one at a time. He wanted to struggle against it, felt there was something he wanted to say yet he couldn’t think of the words. 

Sirius squeezed his hand and sat up, turning rigidly away from Harry as he got to his feet. The floor was sticky instead of slippery, now. Harry looked at his knees until Sirius was out of the room and then he got up, too.

It felt strange, to be back in the tub that was still wet from his preparatory shower, washing again. Doing something so mundane as lathering shampoo into his hair when something life-altering— _ two _ life-altering events, that was—had just occurred in the past hour. He almost thought he’d dreamed it, but when he emerged wet-haired and back in Dudley’s jeans and a wrinkled jumper outside the bathroom, Sirius was standing in the hallway. 

He had found the drawers of band t-shirts and black jeans just as he’d left them, apparently, and wore his standard out-of-date Muggle attire as a result, but everything was a little tight in his regenerated body. He was trying to tug the hem of the shirt lower over the waistband of his trousers when Harry stepped out.

“I’m starved,” he said to Harry brightly. “Feels like I haven’t eaten in a year.”

Harry stared at him while he barked a laugh at his own joke, then turned and led the way down to the kitchen.

When they were across the table and Sirius had eaten a peanut butter sandwich, Harry began to fidget, feeling strangely itchy. Sirius, still chewing, looked at him thoughtfully from across the table, and then Harry felt the firm warmth of Sirius’ ankle sliding over his calf. The strange itchiness stopped, and a wave of something warm and natural poured over Harry in its place.

“Frequent physical contact is generally prescribed after this kind of thing,” Sirius said matter-of-factly. “Your body is missing its blood.”

Harry held still, reveling in the feeling of Sirius leg, settling between Harry’s feet as Sirius wet a thumb and picked up the crumbs from his plate.

“You said I’ve been gone a year. So you’re . . . sixteen?”

Harry tried not to squirm. “In . . . in about a month, I’ll be seventeen,” he offered. 

Sirius winced, pushing the plate away, and pressed his head into his hands. 

Watching him, Harry felt a fresh wave of anxiousness. “I didn’t know another way,” he murmured urgently. “Please, don’t . . . don’t hate me, okay?” He curled his feet beneath his chair, out of range of Sirius’ extended leg, and shuddered at the loss of warmth and connection. “We can pretend it didn’t happen.”

Sirius’ eyes were wide with a kind of horrified amusement. “I could never hate you. And Harry, we . . . ” He winced. “Do you understand that the ritual isn’t a one-time . . . it, Harry. It will have to be sustained with . . . ”

Harry’s heart thudded in his chest. “It said something, yeah, but . . . “ He’d only thought of Sirius. Having Sirius back. Alive. He hadn’t had room in his head for another worry, particularly after Dumbledore fell, and Harry could blame his distraction over figuring out the ritual for not figuring out what was afoot in time to save him. He’d had to make good on the ritual, had to make it worth what it had cost him. Even if he’d known in advance the ritual wasn’t self-sustaining, he would have done it anyway, he realized with a pang of guilt.

And now, the idea that he’d have Sirius under his hands, in his mouth, over and over . . . he’d been afraid before it happened, but now that it had, all he could feel was  _ glad _ . What did that make him, when it wasn’t what Sirius could possibly want?

Sirius was watching him with visible, rising concern. He grasped the edge of the table and leaned over it as far as he could. “Hey. Hey. Look at me. We can figure this out. It doesn’t have to be . . . it doesn’t have to be the only thing in your life. Wixes have been having transactional sex for magical purposes for generations. I’m sure there are ways to make it less . . . personal.”

Harry felt his cheeks flaming. “I didn’t mind,” he blurted. “I liked it.”

Sirius looked like Harry had just told him the sky was green. He swallowed and said carefully, “Well, you’re . . . it was just a physical thing, Harry. You’re a teenager. Stimulus is kind of . . . at your age . . . “ He put his head back in his hands. “Oh, god.”

“No,” Harry said, feeling distant horror that he was saying it aloud but too stubborn to backpedal. “I liked it  _ because _ it was you.”

Sirius dragged his hand down so it was cupped over his mouth, his eyes vaguely amused. “Lots of bases for comparison, hm?”

“No,” Harry admitted, blushing harder. “But I still know how I feel.”

Sirius looked at him with a smile lingering on his mouth and traces of pain lingering in the fine wrinkles on his brow. “Can’t argue with that, can I?”

*

Harry told Sirius about Voldemort and Dumbledore, the war, the—the Horcruxes. He hesitated a moment before that last secret spilled from him, lying fully clothed and flush against Sirius’ chest, their hands threaded together.

“Dumbledore said I could only tell Ron and Hermione, but—” 

But there was no one Harry could trust more than Sirius. Was there?

*

A day later, stretched naked over Sirius’ chest, Harry told him about the attic; the photograph of his mother; the library in a box. Hermione was the one to find the spell that let them descend inside that throttled shrunken space, tiny and vulnerable, and emerge with a book.

Hermione was with him the day he found the grimoire. He’d broken his promise to her never to try any of the spells and rituals within its waxy pages.

“Your mother must have found her family name. And library. ‘Bloom’—I recall it, I think. Fell off the tapestries in the medieval ages. Blood magicians, friendly with my ancestors.” He looked impressed rather than horrified.

“You’re not surprised?” Harry had a hard time keeping his eyes open, let alone following a train of thought, when Sirius stroked his hair. Sirius seemed to have figured that out.

“No. She was a creative witch. And I knew she must have done a protective ritual, sealed by her and James’ . . .” His voice trailed off.

“Their deaths,” Harry finished. He pulled away from Sirius’ hand and crossed his arms over his chest, giving him a puzzled look. “No one ever told me that before.”

“People may forget what’s obvious to you and what isn’t. A protection over you earned by death is blood magic. Sometimes people don’t like to say it out loud if they don’t think they have to.”

“So she died on purpose?” Harry’s heart felt fragile. He didn’t know what answer he wanted.

“As a last resort,” Sirius said softly, reaching for him and pulling his head back down against his chest.

*

**Summer 1998.**

They put Voldemort in the cell he’d visited to kill Gellert Grindelwald a short year earlier. Strangely, Grindelwald’s corpse had hardly deteriorated. Sirius watched dispassionately as it was carried away. He felt nothing for this particular villain one way or another; he was another generation’s enemy.

Sirius and Remus had gone to the prison with the Aurors, just to be sure. Sirius knew well there were certain magics that made Aurors queasy, but not Sirius. He’d use any tool in his arsenal to ensure all the power of the ancient prison was secured against Voldemort.

It was uneventful. The bars shimmered and materialized over the windows as soon as the cell sensed it had an occupant. Levitating outside the tower, Remus signaled Sirius and lowered himself back to the ground, the waiting port-key. Things remained tense between them. Sirius could hardly blame his old friend. He’d blame him more for daring to forgive Sirius, in fact.

Sirius lingered. He looked down into the tower cell, and watched Voldemort angle his scaly, silver-grey skull toward him, so their eyes met.

“I’ll escape,” Voldemort promised. His eyes shone fire-red. “And when I do, I’ll collect my Horcrux. I leave him in your safekeeping ‘til then.”

“You won’t,” Sirius said in an even voice that didn’t betray his pounding heart. “Better wizards than you have tried. Harry will die an old man safe in his bed, and your chunk of cancerous soul with him. Then someone will come here and put you out of your misery.”

*

Harry turned eighteen by the sea. It was a day of grey skies, to Sirius’ vexation. The wind was cold in the morning and the sunrise was nothing but a bleak silver streak on the horizon.

“You can’t control the weather,” Harry told him, amused if shivering, as they walked along the beach. “Or at least, not without significant magical backlash.”

“Don’t quote books at me,” Sirius groused, glaring at the sky. “Come on, it’s cold as bollocks out here.”

In the treehouse cabin Sirius had spent weeks choosing, warming charms and the cabin’s natural magic made the space cozy. But the lower elevation wreaked havoc on his best cooking spells, and he burnt the French toast.

While he swore, Harry smothered his laughter against his arm, but his eyes sparkled with unmistakable amusement. Aghast, Sirius pointed a spatula at him.

“Quiet, boy.”

Harry laughed harder. They ate burnt toast.

These days the magic between them wasn’t as voracious as it had been at first. It was inconveniently at its most voracious in the early years of fighting, the dashes through the woods and frantic apparitions of the Horcrux Hunt. Now it was a constant, almost-pleasant tug on Sirius, and instead of dizzying, feeding it to Harry felt like an ordinary release. Or as ordinary as anything was with Harry.

He still felt guilty most of the time. He’d stolen Harry’s youth, his opportunity for a normal relationship, a normal life.

But he’d always been selfish. And he couldn’t fully regret the ritual, not just because it had brought him back from the empty oblivion of the veil but because it gave him Harry, like this, half-dressed and laughing and smelling of Sirius and sex. It never would have occurred to him to want this with Harry — and if it had, he wouldn’t have  _ dared _ — but he had it. And he was, somehow, indescribably happy as a result.

*

Harry emptied a few low branches of ripe fruit, and they ate that. It was messy work, even with magic. 

The sun emerged in the late afternoon, briefly enough to lure them out to skinny dip in the surf, then thunderclouds rolled through and poured sheets of rain, chasing them back indoors.

While they were gone, though, Kreacher had delivered the cake.

Harry exclaimed happily, but given the various disasters during the carefully-planned day, Sirius made him stay back while he made a closer inspection.

“It’s been ages since Kreacher tried to poison me,” Harry pointed out reasonably.

The cake was very good, and not poisoned. There were no plates, so Sirius conjured them from seashells, making them ornate and opalescent, to Harry’s delight.

“You know, I want to give you everything,” Sirius said later, lying between Harry’s knees with his head on his thigh, the taste of Harry in his mouth, aching from having Harry between his legs. 

Harry gently combed back Sirius’ hair from his face, the way Sirius so often did to him. Sirius saw why he liked it so much.

“You have.”


End file.
